Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) used to be a loved ones identify within the 19th century; as soon as an immensely well known author, he's now mostly forgotten. This publication explores how Scott's paintings grew to become an all-pervasive aspect of reference for cultural reminiscence and collective id within the 19th century, and why it now not has this position. Ann Rigney breaks new floor in reminiscence stories and the research of literary reception via analyzing the dynamics of cultural reminiscence and the 'social existence' of literary texts throughout numerous generations and a number of media. She can pay awareness to the remediation of the Waverley novels as they travelled into portray, the theatre, and fabric tradition, in addition to to the function of 'Scott' as a reminiscence website within the public sphere for a century after his demise. utilizing quite a lot of examples and supported via many illustrations, Rigney demonstrates how remembering Scott's paintings contributed to shaping nationwide and transnational identities as much as global conflict One, and contributed to the emergence of the belief of an English-speaking global encompassing Scotland, the British Empire and the us. Scott's paintings supplied an ingenious source for making a collective relation to the prior that used to be suitable with frequent mobility and social switch; and that he hence cast a powerful alliance among reminiscence, literature, and identification that used to be eminently suited for modernizing. within the approach he helped organize his personal obsolescence yet his legacy keeps within the frequent trust that showcasing the earlier is a situation for transcending it.

Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), "the miracle of Holland," was once well-known as a toddler prodigy, theologian, historian, Dutch political determine, escaped political prisoner, and eventually as Sweden's Ambassador to France. Addressing his contribution to diplomacy, this publication significantly reappraises Grotius' idea, evaluating it to his predecessors and reading it within the context of the wars and controversies of his time.

In early smooth clinical texts, extreme unfulfilled erotic hope is held to be a true and virulent ailment: it truly is categorised as a species of depression, with actual etiologies and therapies. Lesel Dawson analyzes literary representations of lovesickness in terms of scientific principles approximately wish and wider questions about gender and identification, exploring the various ways in which wish is thought to take root within the physique, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of annoyed ardour.

Groups have frequently formed themselves round cultural areas set aside and declared sacred. For this function, church buildings, clergymen or students a minimum of writers often perform giving sacred figures a neighborhood habitation and, occasionally, voice or identify. yet no matter what websites, rites, photographs or narratives have therefore been built, in addition they increase a few advanced questions: how can the sacred be offered and but guarded, claimed but hid, staged in public and whilst stored unique?

Anglo-Saxon key phrases offers a chain of entries that exhibit the hyperlinks among glossy rules and scholarship and the significant innovations of Anglo-Saxon literature, language, and fabric tradition. finds very important hyperlinks among significant innovations of the Anglo-Saxon interval and concerns we expect approximately this day finds how fabric culture—the background of work, drugs, expertise, id, masculinity, intercourse, nutrients, land use—is as very important because the historical past of rules deals a richly theorized method that intersects with many disciplines inside and out of medieval reviews content material:

Additional info for The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move

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As indicated earlier, the present study goes beyond methodological textualism by focusing on the social life of texts and their shifting role in the dynamics of cultural memory. The ‘social life of texts’ supposes that literary texts have multiple afterlives in different material manifestations and social contexts. 16 A text that initially works as an agent of counter-memory in foregrounding hitherto marginalized stories and opening up critical perspectives on dominant narratives can later become an agent of consensus memory if it becomes canonized as an object of recollection in its own right.

Thanks to the novel, then, the memory of the case and the original records of the case were re-circulated and brought back into the culture. But they appeared now as illustrations of the ﬁction derived from them. 50 In reality the two historical cases—the Porteous affair and the affair of Helen Walker and her sister—had nothing to do with each other except the fact that they roughly coincided in time and roughly coincided in place 30 The Afterlives of Walter Scott (taking ‘Scotland’ to be a single location, that is).

The thrust of the plot becomes all the clearer when the fate of the unfortunate Efﬁe is compared with that of her virtuous sister Jeanie: whereas the historical Helen Walker remained unmarried, Scott deviates wildly from his sources by allowing her ﬁctional counterpart Jeanie Deans to inherit the land, rewarding her with a husband, multiple children, prosperity, and a new home in the Highlands, thanks to the paternalistic intervention of the Duke of Argyll. Her sister Efﬁe, in contrast, fails in the novel to have any children within wedlock, is made a widow by her illegitimate child, and ends up going into exile in a French convent while her good-for-nothing son is packed off to the wilds of North America.